2,834 research outputs found
Material Regulation of Out-of-State Production Processes as Impermissible Extraterritorial Law
A circuit split exists on whether the Supreme Court limited the Dormant Commerce Clause’s extraterritoriality doctrine to price affirmation statutes in Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America v. Walsh. This Comment argues that the Supreme Court has never drawn this limiting principle—in Walsh or otherwise—such that the Ninth Circuit incorrectly characterized Walsh in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, and it should have held that the district court’s dependence on this reading constituted clear error in North American Meat Institute v. Becerra. Through synthesis of canonical and recent case law, this Comment proposes a new test for determining impermissible extraterritorial regulation. Under the first prong, a law violates the extraterritoriality doctrine when it materially regulates out-of-state physical production processes to prevent out-of-state harm. The test uses a factor-based inquiry to determine whether a state law constitutes material (as opposed to incidental) regulation of out-of-state production activity. Under the second prong, a law that does not materially regulate out-of-state production should be upheld as per se permissible for purposes of extraterritoriality analysis in certain circumstances. Finally, this Comment applies the proposed test to Proposition 12, the law at issue in Ross and Becerra, and argues that it conforms with the extraterritoriality doctrine because it does not materially regulate the production processes of out-of-state farmers, and because it seeks to regulate out-of-state conduct only through a sales ban attaching restrictions to such production activity. Proposition 12 should survive extraterritoriality scrutiny on these grounds, not because it avoids price controls
The Evaluation of Enhanced Academic Instruction in After-School Programs: Findings After the First Year of Implementation
This report presents one-year implementation and impact findings on two supplemental academic instruction approaches developed for after-school settings -- one for math and one for reading. Compared with regular after-school programming, the supplemental math program had impacts on student SAT 10 test scores and the supplemental reading program did not --although the reading program had some effect on reading fluency
Generalized Warped Disk Equations
The manner in which warps in accretion disks evolve depends on the magnitude of the viscosity. ... See full text for complete abstract
An Efficient Estimation Method for Reducing the Axial Intensity Drop in Circular Cone-Beam CT
Reconstruction algorithms for circular cone-beam (CB) scans have been extensively
studied in the literature. Since insufficient data are measured, an exact reconstruction
is impossible for such a geometry. If the reconstruction algorithm assumes zeros for
the missing data, such as the standard FDK algorithm, a major type of resulting CB
artifacts is the intensity drop along the axial direction. Many algorithms have been
proposed to improve image quality when faced with this problem of data missing; however,
development of an effective and computationally efficient algorithm remains a
major challenge. In this work, we propose a novel method for estimating the unmeasured
data and reducing the intensity drop artifacts. Each CB projection is analyzed in
the Radon space via Grangeat's first derivative. Assuming the CB projection is taken
from a parallel beam geometry, we extract those data that reside in the unmeasured region of the Radon space. These data are then used as in a parallel beam geometry
to calculate a correction term, which is added together with Hu's correction term to
the FDK result to form a final reconstruction. More approximations are then made
on the calculation of the additional term, and the final formula is implemented very
efficiently. The algorithm performance is evaluated using computer simulations on analytical
phantoms. The reconstruction comparison with results using other existing
algorithms shows that the proposed algorithm achieves a superior performance on the
reduction of axial intensity drop artifacts with a high computation efficiency
Factors influencing undergraduate use of e-books: A mixed methods study
Academic libraries invest millions of dollars to make electronic resources available to students for free. However, free access might not necessarily result in students’ sustained interest in and use of e-books. This interdisciplinary, mixed methods research investigates the factors influencing the intention of 279 undergraduate students to use e-books at a land-grant university in the southern US. Structural equation modeling of the survey responses suggests that organizational environment for information technology, external locus of control, subjective norm, perceived enjoyment (i.e., joyfulness), and information technology features play a significant role in influencing the intention of students to use e-books. Based on a combination of quantitative results and qualitative findings, this study identifies eight activities that libraries need to undertake in order to increase the use of e-books by undergraduate students
Lysophosphatidic acid mediates myeloid differentiation within the human bone marrow microenvironment.
Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) is a pleiotropic phospholipid present in the blood and certain tissues at high concentrations; its diverse effects are mediated through differential, tissue specific expression of LPA receptors. Our goal was to determine if LPA exerts lineage-specific effects during normal human hematopoiesis. In vitro stimulation of CD34+ human hematopoietic progenitors by LPA induced myeloid differentiation but had no effect on lymphoid differentiation. LPA receptors were expressed at significantly higher levels on Common Myeloid Progenitors (CMP) than either multipotent Hematopoietic Stem/Progenitor Cells (HSPC) or Common Lymphoid Progenitors (CLP) suggesting that LPA acts on committed myeloid progenitors. Functional studies demonstrated that LPA enhanced migration, induced cell proliferation and reduced apoptosis of isolated CMP, but had no effect on either HSPC or CLP. Analysis of adult and fetal human bone marrow sections showed that PPAP2A, (the enzyme which degrades LPA) was highly expressed in the osteoblastic niche but not in the perivascular regions, whereas Autotaxin (the enzyme that synthesizes LPA) was expressed in perivascular regions of the marrow. We propose that a gradient of LPA with the highest levels in peri-sinusoidal regions and lowest near the endosteal zone, regulates the localization, proliferation and differentiation of myeloid progenitors within the bone marrow marrow
Genome-wide association analysis of secondary imaging phenotypes from the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative study
The aim of this paper is to systematically evaluate a biased sampling issue associated with genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) of imaging phenotypes for most imaging genetic studies, including the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Specifically, the original sampling scheme of these imaging genetic studies is primarily the retrospective case-control design, whereas most existing statistical analyses of these studies ignore such sampling scheme by directly correlating imaging phenotypes (called the secondary traits) with genotype. Although it has been well documented in genetic epidemiology that ignoring the case-control sampling scheme can produce highly biased estimates, and subsequently lead to misleading results and suspicious associations, such findings are not well documented in imaging genetics. We use extensive simulations and a large-scale imaging genetic data analysis of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimag-ing Initiative (ADNI) data to evaluate the effects of the case-control sampling scheme on GWAS results based on some standard statistical methods, such as linear regression methods, while comparing it with several advanced statistical methods that appropriately adjust for the case-control sampling scheme
C22: Eravacycline versus best previously available therapy in adults with pneumonia due to drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii
There are no published studies documenting outcomes with the use of eravacycline against drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. The purpose of this study is to assess the efficacy of eravacycline use, in comparison to best previously available therapy, in patients with drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii pneumonia
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